Microsoft Surface Book 2 Boot from USB Guide

Here is Microsoft Surface Book 2 Boot from USB guide for installing Windows 10, Ubuntu, Arch Linux or any other Linux Distro on your laptop.

About Microsoft Surface Book 2

Surface Book 2 comes with sleek silver magnesium finishing with a great keyboard.
The laptop comes with a larger 15-inch screen which maintains 4K quality with 3240 x 2160 PixelSense Display.
Surface Book 2 is powered by a 1.9 GHz Intel Core i7-8650U Quad-Core processor and 16GB of RAM.
For storage, it provides 256GB SSD.
The laptop supports a 6GB GDDR5 Graphics card NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060.
Furthermore, it has ports including two USB-A 3.1 ports, one USB-C port, headphone jack, Surface Connector, and SD card reader.
Other then great design and performance it also supports a 1080p Camera.
Lastly, Windows 10 64-bit OS is pre-installed in Microsoft Surface Book 2.

What is Boot from USB?

It is a process of starting a Computer operating system from the USB drive.
Booting from USB enables to get booting information in a USB rather than using a hard disk or the CD drive.
All new operating systems support to boot from USB in Microsoft Surface Book 2.

Advantages of Booting from USB?

There are many advantages of Booting from USB over other booting options such as DVD and other which are discussed below,

No need to purchase any blank CD and you can fill your own stuff along with the ISO file.
USB Drives are reusable
Faster read and write than CD
Very convenient and portable

Disadvantages of Booting from USB

Booting from USB is depended on the Hardware such as BIOS, motherboard and flash drive model as it may be working with one computer and refuses to another.
CD has wider support and USB boot functionality is not available for may operating system.

Ways to Boot From USB in Microsoft Book 2

1. Surface Book 2 Boot from USB using Rufus

Download Rufus

After installing Rufus simply select the ISO file from the file manager and accept all settings when the popup window appears.
Select MBR partition scheme for BIOS or UEFI and If your laptop has UEFI bios then select the other two options.
For the Filesystem select NTFS option and select if your PC has UEFI bios then select FAT32.
The default Cluster size option should be selected.
Make sure all three options including Quick Format, Create a Bootable disk using and Create extended labels and icon files are selected.
Finally, start the process and this software will automatically format and create bootable USB flash drive.

Read Also – Install Ubuntu on Surface Book 2

2. Surface Book 2 Boot from USB using Unetbootin

UNetbootin enables you to create a bootable USB drive for Live operating system for Ubuntu and other Linux distributions. To create a Bootable Live USB drive follow the instructions below,

Download UNetbootin

UNetbootin installs the Linux Distros ISO files for you if you want to use your own downloaded ISO file then follow instructions below,
To use already downloaded ISO file select the disk image option and provide the location of the file by clicking “…”.
After selecting the Linux Distribution or ISO file Format your USB drive as FAT32.
Target the USB drive on your Microsoft Surface Book 2 and click on OK.
The process will automatically start and in case the installation doesn’t complete you can reformat USB as FAT32.

To change the Boot order to USB in Surface Book 2

Turn off your Surface Book 2
Now insert the Bootable USB which you have created with the help of software available above.
Next, Press and hold the volume down button of your Surface Book 2.
Now press and release the power button while holding down the volume-down button on your Laptop.
Finally, your Surface Book 2 should now boot from USB.

Read some installation guides,